vy their
betters, for the life was too different, and they had an ideal of ease
which made the existence of the middle-classes seem formal and stiff;
moreover, they had a certain contempt for them because they were soft and
did not work with their hands. The proud merely wished to be left alone,
but the majority looked upon the well-to-do as people to be exploited;
they knew what to say in order to get such advantages as the charitable
put at their disposal, and they accepted benefits as a right which came to
them from the folly of their superiors and their own astuteness. They bore
the curate with contemptuous indifference, but the district visitor
excited their bitter hatred. She came in and opened your windows without
so much as a by your leave or with your leave, 'and me with my bronchitis,
enough to give me my death of cold;' she poked her nose into corners, and
if she didn't say the place was dirty you saw what she thought right
enough, 'an' it's all very well for them as 'as servants, but I'd like to
see what she'd make of 'er room if she 'ad four children, and 'ad to do
the cookin', and mend their clothes, and wash them.'

Philip discovered that the greatest tragedy of life to these people was
not separation or death, that was natural and the grief of it could be
assuaged with tears, but loss of work. He saw a man come home one
afternoon, three days after his wife's confinement, and tell her he had
been dismissed; he was a builder and at that time work was slack; he
stated the fact, and sat down to his tea.

"Oh, Jim," she said.

The man ate stolidly some mess which had been stewing in a sauce-pan
against his coming; he stared at his plate; his wife looked at him two or
three times, with little startled glances, and then quite silently began
to cry. The builder was an uncouth little fellow with a rough,
weather-beaten face and a long white scar on his forehead; he had large,
stubbly hands. Presently he pushed aside his plate as if he must give up
the effort to force himself to eat, and turned a fixed gaze out of the
window. The room was at the top of the house, at the back, and one saw
nothing but sullen clouds. The silence seemed heavy with despair. Philip
felt that there was nothing to be said, he could only go; and as he walked
away wearily, for he had been up most of the night, his heart was filled
with rage against the cruelty of the world. He knew the hopelessness of
the search for work and the desolatio